Contributing Experts
John Lindeman is widely respected as one of Australia's leading property market analysts, authors and commentators. Visit Lindeman Reports for more information. He has well over fifteen years’ experience researching the nature and dynamics of the housing market at major data analysts. John’s monthly column on housing market research featured in Australian Property Investor Magazine for over five years. He is a regular contributor to Your Investment Property Magazine and other property investment publications and e-newsletters such as Kevin Turners Real Estate Talk, Michael Yardney’s Property Update and Alan Kohler’s Eureka Report. John also authored the landmark books for property investors, Mastering the Australian Housing Market, and Unlocking the Property Market, both published by Wileys.
The logic of spreading the risk by balancing or diversifying your properties is that if the values (or prospective values) of one of your properties slumps, good continued performance in the others will still give you an acceptable overall result. From this logic, you can see that it is uncertainty that urges us to diversify, not the surety of high returns, because if we were really sure about the outcome, there would be no logic in diversifying at all.
Australians prefer to live in large cities and this growing urbanisation generates ever growing demand for housing in already heavily populated and over developed coastal areas. This adds to infrastructure development and maintenance costs as well as creating more or less continuous housing shortages in most of our capital cities.